The risks and rewards of Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea

Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea could have been a political disaster for Clinton if Kim Jong Il had wanted to continue playing games with the West, but instead it became a win-win event for all parties involved. Steve Clemons explains.

Steve also points out that John Bolton is trying to have an apoplectic fit over Clinton's trip to North Korea. When Bolton has a fit, that usually means someone did something right.

Dick Cheney - The most dangerous man in America

Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman has published his book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, describing Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President America has ever suffered. Much of what Gellman has written is new information for the public.

The story that becomes clear is that Dick Cheney arranged to have himself chosen Vice President by George W. Bush, and from that position has spent the last seven-and-a-half years working to create a Monarchical role of"Commander in Chief" for the American President in which the President is the supreme decision-maker with almost no limitations by any other institution including Congress and the Courts. Except for earlier reports by Gellman this story has also completely escaped the notice of the American media.

The following is an except from the review of "Angler" by Steve Clemons.

Richard Cheney has sculpted the vice presidency in a way never seen before. He revolutionized an office that has turned many of its occupants into obscure eccentrics—one that Benjamin Franklin referred to as “Your Superfluous Excellency.” Cheney refused to do state funerals. Instead, he rerouted the in- and outboxes of power in the White House and turned himself into the nation’s most consequential political force. Whether George W. Bush approved or not, his VP animated most of the controversial policies that will define for decades the Bush II presidency. [Snip]

Cheney was put in charge of finding Bush’s VP, and he positioned himself for selection. He uncovered, through an exhaustive questionnaire process, the most private and intimate details of the lives of the other candidates. No one vetted Cheney, though, so nobody had anything on him. He had the goods on everyone else, and he got the nod from Bush.

The curious way in which Cheney maneuvered himself onto Bush’s ticket is one of many disturbing stories in this new and brilliantly researched account of Cheney’s adventures as Bush’s “No. 2.” Barton Gellman, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist, examines the nuts and bolts of Cheney’s power apparatus. He shows how a mere vice president engineered a massive expansion of presidential power, knocked back the constitutional authority of Congress and the judiciary, helped launch an illegitimate war, developed a system for spying on America’s citizens, oversaw White House-sanctioned torture, and pushed official secrecy to unprecedented levels. We see how Cheney punctured America’s mystique as a benign and respected nation—how he shattered the moral, economic, and military pillars of American power. [Snip]

Gellman ... records previously unknown anecdotes about the inner workings of the administration and Cheney’s take-no-prisoners approach to winning policy battles. While Bush and members of his inner circle like Karl Rove seemed to be obsessed with the political machinations of their work, Cheney had a deeper purpose behind his crusades. For him politics and political gamesmanship, seduction, and intimidation were all about changing the nation’s policy course—all about principle. Cheney['s]... heart and soul were invested in the most important and controversial aspects of the Bush presidency, the policy areas he cared about most—terrorism, intelligence, national security, energy, environmental policy, tax and budget issues.[Snip]

Cheney and his abrasive lawyer David Addington wanted to bring on governmental crises and tensions with Congress in order to demonstrate the dominance and infallibility of presidential power, which they defined as the “unitary executive.” In Gellman’s framing, Cheney saw 9/11, discussions with energy lobbyists, and even torture policy as mere vehicles for asserting his vision of a near monarchical presidency.

Angler leads its readers to think that, even without 9/11, Cheney would have found triggers to justify his imperial expansion of presidential powers and official secrecy, his pugnacious disregard for international law, the huge defense spending increases, the war against Iraq—or whatever nation would show that America was an irresistible force—and the massive tax cuts. Gellman argues that Cheney was never an apostle of neoconservatism. He didn’t have a burning desire to establish democracy in Iraq. For Cheney, John Bolton, Addington, and others, Iraq was but a means to an end—a tool to expand presidential prerogatives. The same does not necessarily apply to Scooter Libby, a leading neoconservative thinker who strongly favored the invasion for ideological reasons.

This book is simply one of the scariest stories ever written about contemporary America. Cheney and Addington essentially hijacked the bureaucracy of national security and put themselves in the cockpit of government. In chapter after chapter, we read how Cheney set about constructing a secretive system of government and policymaking in which he was accountable to almost no one. We see, for instance, how Cheney pushed through the second round of tax cuts—a move that made even Bush uncomfortable—and how he undermined Christine Todd Whitman, then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, over laws regarding air quality. [Snip]

Cheney’s maneuvers, his angling inside the wide berth that Bush gave him, eventually created so much blowback from colleagues inside the administration and Congress that his office began to slide off its rails. Gellman relates a telling incident involving this reviewer and the vice president on the subject of North Korea, when it appeared that Cheney was unaware of President Bush’s intention to ask Congress to remove North Korea from the terrorist watch list. (I was not the source of this information: the New York Times reported the encounter between Cheney and me on its front page.) At an off-the-record forum, I asked Cheney about the possible change toward North Korea. The question was simple, but Cheney froze, staring at me for an awkwardly long time. He refused to answer, then left the stage. Gellman suggests that Cheney, who for years had been wired into every key national-security decision and able to paralyze nearly all policies with which he disagreed, had been left out—“not read in,” according to the lingo—of the policy-making process, the very tactic his team had so often used against their rivals.

Cheney was also frustrated on the Iran front, increasingly convinced that his team was losing in the interagency process to State Department officials R. Nicholas Burns, Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Gates. He felt his hawkish, more militarily focused strategy was being undermined by advocates of diplomacy. In a Salon article on Sept. 19, 2007, “Why Bush Won’t Attack Iran,” I disclosed that a senior member of Cheney’s team had said that the vice president was considering ways to “tie the president’s hands” and outflank those delaying a confrontation with Tehran—a policy that Cheney felt amounted to appeasement. Clearly, the Angler’s influence was declining. Some sources suggest that Cheney still wields great power and has of late been winning his battles again against Rice, Bellinger, Gates, and others. But he is certainly a long way from his halcyon first years in office, when he had virtually nothing stopping him.

[highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]

This looks like a book that explains a great deal of the inner workings - especially the series of blunders - of the Bush White House since January 2001.

Here's a question this review triggers. A great many people have anticipated that Bush will create some form of "October Surprise" between now and the Presidential election in order to get McCain elected President. But if Cheney has been the primary motivator of so many of the White House activities, is Cheney either interested or in a position to cause some kind of international incident in the next two weeks? What is the relationship between McCain and Cheney?

I have written a great deal about the Reagan Revolution, its underlying conservative ideology, and the manner in which the Reagan Revolution has led directly to the present credit crisis and Recession. Gellman's book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, suggests that behind the scenes of - and perhaps even mostly unrelated to - the current economic crises there has been a very different mechanism for many of the disasters that have been created by the Bush administration. I suspect that this book will be the basis for a lot of the defenses created by conservatives to avoid blame for the disastrous state that America has been brought down to. It won't wash. Dick Cheney and his acolytes have been a key element of Republican dominance for the last three decades and especially so since 2001. The Conservatives who will be wanting to distance themselves from him are the same ones who linked arms and supported his actions in lockstep, just as the social conservatives have. Conservatives are driven as much be social cronyism as they are by their myth of ideology. They just don't like to look at that aspect of being a conservative.

A Review of a book is supposed to sell people on the idea of buying and reading it. Steve Clemon's review has succeeded.

America on the decline in the world

Steve Clemons just got back from a conference in Germany and posted some thoughts that tend to confirm what I have thought about America in the World recently.

"I've just returned from Berlin and am scribbling a brief note from JFK Airport in New York.

One of the unavoidable impressions I got from Europeans and particularly Germans during this trip is that there is widespread regret that America has slipped off its pedestal as a largely benign superpower that promoted liberty and economic opportunity. The dollar's decline against the euro has only reinforced a widespread view that America can't afford its global pretensions any longer. While America remains important, it is clear to everyone that it is less so. [Snip]

A widespread view among elite Germans and the non-elite normal types I spoke to is that America is in fast decline -- sort of like Britain after World War II. I think that the impressions foreigners have of this decline is "overshooting reality" as there are many substantive realities about America's ability to deploy force and purpose in the world that remain formidable.

I'm a bit surprised to see this written, but it confirms my own impression of the American position in the world currently.

I've written this before. After WW II the U.S. was the only industrial nation in the world which had not had its industrial infrastructure destroyed by the war. Our factories were in great shape and looking for customers world-wide, and we had the shipping available to ship the goods anywhere anyone wanted them. We had the financial centers which could finance such commerce and a government that encouraged it, so that New York surpassed London as the world financial center. The dollar became the world currency and was managed as such out of Washington D.C.

Militarily we were protected because we had the nuclear bomb. It also was a clear talisman that America was "Number One" in the World in a military sense.

American business was managed by a lot of men who had learned a true "can-do" attitude during the War, so that they tended to spend their time building businesses instead of scrapping with labor over how the profits would be shared. The result was a real benefit to the incomes of workers in general as well as to business in general, and led to a recognition that the waste of human resources that Segregation represented had to end. Segregation was both a moral and economic abomination. The amazing body of government funded research that came out of the war created numerous opportunities for whole new industries (particularly aviation) and the government continued to fund the development of computers until they became economically viable and a new industry. The GI Bill provided the necessary educated labor force to make all this work.

The Korean War and the Cold War were the only dark clouds on the horizon. Politically the American right wing had to frighten voters in order to get elected, so they latched on to the then pretty much destroyed Communist threat and played the fear card for all it was worth.

The expansion of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe was primarily the movement of a numerous, very weak military representing the winning side of WW II into the vacuum of a destroyed Europe. The takeover of China by the Red Army was the success of a well-managed army that enforced honesty in its leaders and offered a previously unknown economic salvation and peace to the Chinese peasantry, in opposition to the corrupt KMT which mainly wanted to reinstitute the old Chinese class system with the KMT members as the new upper class. Neither the USSR nor the Chinese Communists were especially powerful. Each was in the position of having an effective organized force it could use to move into a political vacuum.

It's not clear that the Cold War could have been avoided, but the end result was never really in doubt. Communism offered an inadequate economic ideology that did not offer a viable economic system. This was attached to a pre-industrialism form of government that could not be adapted to the industrial factory manufacturing model effectively. The requirement to enforce the Communist ideology even in the face of its obvious failure forced both the USSR and the Communist China (separately) to adopt totalitarian models of government if they were not to abandon the failed economic policies their ideology demanded. Marxist-Leninism did, however, offer a vehicle for accumulating techniques and tactics for fighting against western right-wing exploitative capitalism, however, and was used as such.

America really did stand astride the world alone in those days. But by the end of the 1950's Germany and Japan had been sufficiently rebuilt so as to begin to provide real economic competition to America, and it was such a new thing to the American business management that they didn't recognize the challenge or deal with it. They'd been on top so long that they assumed that was their rightful place forever. The American financial industry made the same assumption, failing to recognize that the financial economy is no better than the real economy it rests on.

The right-wing, fighting to overcome the FDR democrats who had controlled government, continued to ride the exaggerated threat of Communism. This led the American economy to rely excessively on the Military Industrial Complex for economic growth, and led our government (from Eisenhower through Kennedy to Johnson) into the disaster we call the War in Vietnam. Military spending is inherently destructive of economic growth in the long run. The American inflation that started under Johnson and accelerated under Nixon and Ford was a direct result. Carter inherited both the inflation and the military spending that had caused it as had Ford, and also faced the consolidation of the oil producing states into an effective OPEC (based on the amazingly effective Texas Railroad Commission structure. TRC was the first OPEC.) Carter's solution was to work to find substituted for the American dependence on oil and to install Paul Volcker as the new Federal Reserve Chairman. Volcker sharply increased interest rates, causing the recession of the early 1980's, and removing inflationary expectations from the economy.

The oil companies, however, got together with OPEC and established a price for oil that was too low to encourage private enterprise to research for alternatives, while stopping all government-funded research. The result has kept Oil company profits higher for nearly thirty years, and only now it the real bill for that coming due.

The result of all this is that America has been in financial and economic decline since the early 1960's. There has been too much military spending, with not enough spending on basic research. Shutting down the Super Conducting Super Collider after half its $5 billion budget had already been spent has delayed physics basic research world wide for two decades and sent it to CERN, Switzerland instead of Texas. College tuitions have been increased and are today primarily funded by student loans rather than by grants, so that an MD who graduates from medical school today faces student loan payments for thirty years or so. Most of the rest of the world has instead invested in its educated labor. American bleeds it financially.

The financial position of America in the world today is a legacy of the post WW II period when the dollar was established as the world currency. Today it remains the world currency only because it is to the (short-term) advantage of the Chinese economy. Without the Chinese buying American debt, American would have followed Argentina into bankruptcy sometime in the last decade.

The mismanagement of the Federal budget by the Bush administration assures that the bankruptcy will arrive. When the EURO was established, it was designed to be on par with the dollar, one for one. Today it requires at least $1.30 American to buy one EURO. For a nation that spend the last half century on top of the world in terms of the economy, moral leadership, and military power, the economic aspects of leadership are in the past, Bush has abandoned all pretense at moral leadership, and the insurgents in Iraq have clearly demonstrated that the U.S. cannot effectively fight an insurgency in a distant country.

The decline of America as the unique leading nation in the world is obvious for anyone to see now. It leaves a power vacuum in the world that Europe is not prepared to fill. It appears to me that China is moving to fill some of that vacuum, and that explains why China is building soft-power around the world. This has become obvious in the last year or two, and it is in large part a direct result of the fact that the Bush administration has been so tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan that they took their eye off the ball and have allowed China to make such moves. [This probably is not bad. American - Chinese relations are much better than they would have been if Cheney and Rumsfeld had not decided to defend against terrorists by attacking Iraq.]

With luck the Republicans will have so thoroughly discredited their fear-mongering that they will not be able to prevent America from recognizing its new, less exalted world position and take appropriate actions to invest in our people and our economy. In this the Europeans will, I am certain, be glad to cooperate. It will be to their advantage as well as ours. But right now we need to stop letting the insurgents in Iraq bleed the giant in an unwinnable and unnecessary war. That means getting rid of Bush and Cheney as rapidly as possible. Beyond that, we'll just have to see where it goes. Like an alcoholic, America appears to now recognize that it has hit rock bottom. That is the first step to recovery, and this is still a very great nation, no matter how badly the conservatives mistreat it.

Cuba's medical foreign aid vs. American's military foreign aid.

If you want to make friends with the top government leaders of a nation, you will rarely go wrong giving them military foreign aid. But Cuba has shown that there is a way to get the people of foreign nations to be our friends. This is from Steve Clemons (as I promised a while back):

Cuba used to export soldiers, weapons, and the ideology if not entirely the reality of Fidel and Che style revolution.

Today, Cuba exports doctors. More on that another time -- but just as a quick aside, Cuba has exported tens of thousands of doctors to some of the poorest and most remote parts of Latin America as well as other parts of the world. Cuba actually maintains a highly successful bartering arrangement of doctors for oil with Venezuela. This is clearly a page out of the 'spirit' of the John F. Kennedy initiated Peace Corps. (For other dimensions of Cuba's international medical "public diplomacy", a great resource is MEDICC.)

President Bush, in contrast, offered during his recent trip through Latin America to those in medical need some treatment on the USNS Comfort, an American warship outfitted to provide medical support at "ports" that the ill would need to travel to.

Specifically, the USNS Comfort will make port calls in Belize, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname. President Bush's offer is a somewhat commendable, first step -- but in contrast, Cuban doctors are deployed in small villages and remote mountain regions. They are embedded in countries much like Peace Corps staff are. But American style relief comes on a war ship with the needy making their way to us, not us doing more to reach them.

While too much of American foreign policy has become over-militarized, Cuba's, quite remarkably, has become more humanized and more reflective of the hard gains that can come from Joe Nye's notion of "soft power."

The only nations that need military aid are those with aggressive neighbors and those who want to use the military to protect their government form their own people. But almost all nations need additional health care services, and those services are best provided close to the customers.

There is also the fact that military equipment and personnel are a drain on every nation that pays for them. They provide nothing positive economically. This is very unlike spending on health care services. A healthy populace is a highly productive populace.

This looks like a really good idea to me. Of course, American conservatives will hate it. They don't like people helping others. All they like is leaders helping other leaders oppressing and otherwise ignoring the hoi polloi.

Advance notice of Steve Clemon's discussion of Cuba.

I really just found Steve Clemon's teaser about what he is going to write about really fascinating, so I wanted to share his teaser.

I need to tell what I learned about Cuba's current political climate, the impact of America's embargo and travel ban, the lives of normal folks I met, and the business activity I saw beginning to hit a higher pitch. I have some thoughts on Hugo Chavez and Hemingway, on Martin Luther King's followers in Havana and how America is screwing over some very good social work, and how Fidel's master plan of forsaking military exports in favor of shipping out doctors to nations in need around the world was a stroke of genius that has outmaneuvered America's over-militarized response to most problems.

Both former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson and I went to Cuba legally -- under the license provisions that allow researchers to travel there -- and even had my passport officially stamped, which I understand many do not do.[PPS Editor - underlining is mine.]

This should be really interesting.

I really like the focus on castro's export of Doctors rather than soldiers. Anyone remember the US Peace Corps? Same idea. What are the two largest problems of poor nations around the world? Health, hunger and education. If the members of the Cuban diapora had started sending out Doctors to South and Latin America instead of trying to invade Cuba, Castro would have lost power years ago. Instead, American right-wingers and Cuban refugees attempted to regain power by invading Cuba - and lost.

But they had to use military methods and the embargo because the Cubans wanted to regain their wealth and high status in Cuba, something the Cuban Refugees could not do unless the Castro Revolution were totally erased from the Island. Since the Cuban Revolution was a reaction to the Fulgencio Batista authoritarian government, Cubans are not going to go back.

[Please note: I in no way support the authoritarian government of Castro's Cuba. My point is that our use of force and the military was totally ineffective in changing the authoritarian Communist direction it took. The embargo clearly extended Castros rule long after it would have collapsed without the American pressure.]